Playing ball: minor-league teams pitch new parks as a way for downtown development to hit a home run.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer
• Position: FEATURE

About 20 years ago, the Durham Bulls minor-league baseball team was thinking about leaving downtown. The movie Bull Durham had debuted in 1988, and 5,000-seat Durham Athletic Park, the team's home since 1926, was bursting at the seams. Two years after the film's release, the club became the nation's first Class A affiliate to surpass 300,000 in season attendance. At the behest of then-owner Miles Wolff, Durham County commissioners approved a bond referendum for a new ballpark, but voters shot it down. The team was sold in 1990 to Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Co., whose CEO and president, Jim Goodmon, decided to move the team to a multisport complex he wanted to build near Raleigh-Durham International Airport. But the City Council grabbed the Bulls by the horns, allocating $16.1 million to build Durham Bulls Athletic Park without a referendum. It wasn't a popular move. One councilman, considered the plan's most ardent supporter, lost his seat in the next election. "Nobody remembers how difficult and ugly it was," says George Habel, vice president of Capitol's sports group. "But the ballpark turned out to be a great success." The stadium opened in 1995 with 7,500 seats--later expanded at Capitol's expense to 10,000--and is owned by the city and leased to the team.

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Not only did it draw more fans, it eventually spurred millions in economic development. Before the stadium was built, downtown had less than 1 million square feet of office space, fewer than 100 residential units and not even 3,000 people worked there, according to Bill Kalkhof, president of the nonprofit booster group Downtown Durham Inc. It now has almost 3 million square feet of office space, nearly 1,000 residential units and more than 15,000 employees. Capitol, the city and the county invested $200 million renovating nearby tobacco factories and warehouses into the American Tobacco Campus, a mixed-used development. Across the street stands the $47 million Durham Performing Arts Center, which opened in 2008 and earned $2.5 million in 2010-11. "None of those would've happened without the ballpark," Kalkhof says.

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Durham's success has inspired copycats and wannabes. Greensboro and Winston-Salem have opened downtown ballparks, and the Charlotte Knights want one in the Queen City's "uptown." Kalkhof, Habel and Durham Mayor Bill Bell recently met with Wilmington City Council members, who are considering a proposal from developers to...